The University at Albany’s 17th annual English Graduate Student Organization Conference, Race: Embodying Academia, welcomes papers, projects, and creative works that explore the many ways in which race, racism, and racialization function at the intersections of our institutions, classrooms, and literary texts. As readers and writers, the language we use to construct racialized identities can offer spaces to racially marginalized assemblages. Yet, we must also recognize the irreconcilable ways in which that same language imposes limitations, dismissing the work of writers of color, leaving them isolated and/or othered. With academic culture becoming reliant on rhetoric of diversity and inclusion, how do those very same mechanisms produce and reproduce institutionalized racialization? How does racialization in academia work to include or exclude students, faculty, and staff? How do some bodies, more than others, become racialized on and off the page, and at what cost? In what ways are some bodies (dis)identified as ‘raced’ in academia? Must racialized bodies function as a homogenous body—upon which racism works forcibly? Furthermore, through documents and policies of equity, inclusion, and diversity, can/do neoliberal institutions make way for legitimizing racialization of that body? How does the ‘progressive’ process of internationalization of campuses inversely racialize bodies? To that end, we encourage scholars from various fields to submit proposals that engage with the topic of race, as they’ve encountered it in academic circles, and perhaps as they wish it were going forward. In addition to more formally critical work, this conference welcomes creative works that are in dialogue with this year’s theme.

Avenues of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

Intersectional studies

Creative writing (fiction, poetry, essays, film, hybrid work)

Decolonizing knowledge production

Theorizing dehumanization

Decolonizing pedagogy

Employment disparities

Fracture and fragmentation of the body

Geography and empire

Immigration, emigration, and citizenship

Climate change and ecopolitics

Protest, activism, civil and human rights

Self-advocacy and self-care

Censorship in academia

Work study, financial aid, and the exploitation of student labor

Equality vs. equity

Mass incarceration and teaching in prisons

Confronting racism in creative writing workshops

We schedule approximately 15 minutes for each presentation. For critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to egsoalbany@gmail.com. For creative presentations, please submit a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi. .mp4, or .doc files), as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to egsoalbany@gmail.com. All submissions should include “EGSO Conference” in the subject line. The deadline for submissions is January 18, 2019.